Commentary By

Jamie Shupe retired from the Army with the rank of sergeant first class. He previously identified as transgender and was the first American to obtain nonbinary status under law.

Four years ago, I wrote about my decision to
live as a woman in The New York Times, writing that I had wanted to live “authentically as the woman that I have always been,” and had
“effectively traded my white male privilege to become one of America’s most
hated minorities.”

Three years ago, I decided that I was neither male nor female, but nonbinary—and made headlines after an Oregon judge agreed to let me identify as a third sex, not male or female.

Now, I want to live again as the man that I
am.

I’m one of the lucky ones. Despite participating in medical
transgenderism for six years, my body is still intact. Most people who desist
from transgender identities after gender changes can’t say the same.

But that’s not to say I got off scot-free. My psyche is
eternally scarred, and I’ve got a host of health issues from the grand medical
experiment.

Here’s how things began.

After convincing myself that I was a woman during a severe mental health crisis, I visited a licensed nurse practitioner in early 2013 and asked for a hormone prescription. “If you don’t give me the drugs, I’ll buy them off the internet,” I threatened.

Although she’d never met me before, the nurse phoned in a
prescription for 2 mg of oral estrogen and 200 mg of Spironolactone that very
same day.

The nurse practitioner ignored that I have chronic post-traumatic stress disorder, having previously served in the military for almost 18 years. All of my doctors agree on that. Others believe that I have bipolar disorder and possibly borderline personality disorder.

I should have been stopped, but out-of-control, transgender
activism had made the nurse practitioner too scared to say no.

Jamie Shupe identifying as a transgender woman in May 2015. (Photo: Jamie Shupe)

I’d learned how to become a female from online medical
documents at a Department of Veterans Affairs hospital website.

After I began consuming the cross-sex hormones, I started
therapy at a gender clinic in Pittsburgh so that I could get people to sign off
on the transgender surgeries I planned to have.

All I needed to do was switch over my hormone operating fuel and get my penis turned into a vagina. Then I’d be the same as any other woman. That’s the fantasy the transgender community sold me. It’s the lie I bought into and believed.

Only one therapist tried to stop me from crawling into this smoking rabbit hole. When she did, I not only fired her, I filed a formal complaint against her. “She’s a gatekeeper,” the trans community said.

I should have been stopped, but out-of-control, transgender activism had made the nurse practitioner too scared to say no.

Professional stigmatisms against “conversion therapy” had
made it impossible for the therapist to question my motives for wanting to
change my sex.

The “Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders” (Fifth Edition) says one of the traits of gender dysphoria is believing that you possess the stereotypical feelings of the opposite sex. I felt that about myself, but yet no therapist discussed it with me.

Two weeks hadn’t passed before I found a replacement
therapist. The new one quickly affirmed my identity as a woman. I was back on
the road to getting vaginoplasty.

There’s abundant online literature informing transgender
people that their sex change isn’t real. But when a licensed medical doctor
writes you a letter essentially stating that you were born in the wrong body
and a government agency or court of law validates that delusion, you become
damaged and confused. I certainly did.

Painful Roots

My trauma history resembles a ride down the Highway of Death
during the first Gulf War.

As a child, I was sexually abused by a male relative. My parents severely beat me. At this point, I’ve been exposed to so much violence and had so many close calls that I don’t know how to explain why I’m still alive. Nor do I know how to mentally process some of the things I’ve seen and experienced.

Jamie Shupe as a preteen. (Photo: Jamie Shupe)

Dr. Ray Blanchard has an unpopular theory that explains why someone like me may have been drawn to transgenderism. He claims there are two types of transgender women: homosexuals that are attracted to men, and men who are attracted to the thought or image of themselves as females.

It’s a tough thing to admit, but I belong to the latter
group. We are classified as having autogynephilia.

After having watched pornography for years while in the Army and being married to a woman who resisted my demands to become the ideal female, I became that female instead. At least in my head.

Jamie Shupe as a soldier at Fort Hood. (Photo: Jamie Shupe)

While autogynephilia was my motivation to become a woman,
gender stereotypes were my means of implementation. I believed wearing a long
wig, dresses, heels, and makeup would make me a woman.

Feminists begged to differ on that. They rejected me for
conforming to female stereotypes. But as a new member of the transgender
community, I beat up on them too. The women who become men don’t fight the
transgender community’s wars. The men in dresses do.

Medical Malpractice

The best thing that could have happened would have been for someone to order intensive therapy. That would have protected me from my inclination to cross-dress and my risky sexual transgressions, of which there were many.

Instead, quacks in the medical community hid me in the women’s bathroom with people’s wives and daughters. “Your gender identity is female,” these alleged professionals said.

Trans men are winning in medicine, and they’ve won the battle for language.

The medical community is so afraid of the trans community that they’re now afraid to give someone Blanchard’s diagnosis. Trans men are winning in medicine, and they’ve won the battle for language.

Think of the word “transvestite.” They’ve succeeded in making it a vulgar word, even though it just means men dressing like women. People are no longer allowed to tell the truth about men like me. Everyone now has to call us transgender instead.

The diagnostic code in my records at the VA should read
Transvestic Disorder (302.3). Instead, the novel theories of Judith Butler and
Anne Fausto-Sterling have been used to cover up the truths written about by
Blanchard, J. Michael Bailey, and Alice Dreger.

I confess to having been motivated by autogynephilia during
all of this. Blanchard was right.

Trauma, hypersexuality owing to childhood sexual abuse, and
autogynephilia are all supposed to be red flags for those involved in the
medical arts of psychology, psychiatry, and physical medicine—yet nobody except
for the one therapist in Pittsburgh ever tried to stop me from changing my sex.
They just kept helping me to harm myself.

Escaping to ‘Nonbinary’

Three years into my gender change from male to female, I
looked hard into the mirror one day. When I did, the facade of femininity and
womanhood crumbled.

Despite having taken or been injected with every hormone and
antiandrogen concoction in the VA’s medical arsenal, I didn’t look anything
like a female. People on the street agreed. Their harsh stares reflected the
reality behind my fraudulent existence as a woman. Biological sex is immutable.

When the fantasy of being a woman came to an end, I asked two of my doctors to allow me to become nonbinary instead of female to bail me out. Both readily agreed.

After pumping me full of hormones—the equivalent of 20 birth
control pills per day—they each wrote a sex change letter. The two weren’t just
bailing me out. They were getting themselves off the hook for my failed sex
change. One worked at the VA. The other worked at Oregon Health & Science
University.

To escape the delusion of having become a woman, I did something completely unprecedented in American history. In 2016, I convinced an Oregon judge to declare my sex to be nonbinary—neither male nor female.

In my psychotic mind, I had restored the mythical third sex to North America. And I became the first legally recognized nonbinary person in the country.

Celebrity Status

The landmark court decision catapulted me to instant fame
within the LGBT community. For 10 nonstop days afterward, the media didn’t let
me sleep. Reporters hung out in my Facebook feed, journalists clung to my every
word, and a Portland television station beamed my wife and I into living rooms
in the United Kingdom.

Within months, I scored another historic win after the
Department of Vital Records issued me a brand new birth certificate from
Washington, D.C., where I was born. A local group called Whitman-Walker Health
had gotten my sex designation on my birth certificate switched to
“unknown.” It was the first time in D.C. history a birth
certificate had been printed with a sex marker other than male or female.

Another transgender legal aid organization jumped on the Jamie Shupe bandwagon, too. Lambda Legal used my nonbinary court order to help convince a Colorado federal judge to order the State Department to issue a passport with an X marker (meaning nonbinary) to a separate plaintiff named Dana Zzyym.

LGBT organizations helping me to screw up my life had become
a common theme. During my prior sex change to female, the New York-based
Transgender Legal Defense & Education Fund had gotten my name legally changed.
I didn’t like being named after the uncle who’d molested me. Instead of getting
me therapy for that, they got me a new name.

A Pennsylvania judge didn’t question the name change,
either. Wanting to help a transgender person, she had not only changed my name,
but at my request she also sealed the court order, allowing me to skip out on a
ton of debt I owed because of a failed home purchase and begin my new life as a
woman. Instead of merging my file, two of the three credit bureaus issued me a brand
new line of credit.

Walking Away From Fiction

It wasn’t until I came out against the sterilization and
mutilation of gender-confused children and transgender military service members
in 2017 that LGBT organizations stopped helping me. Most of the media retreated
with them.

Overnight, I went from being a liberal media darling to a
conservative pariah.

Both groups quickly began to realize that the transgender community had a runaway on their hands. Their solution was to completely ignore me and what my story had become. They also stopped acknowledging that I was behind the nonbinary option that now exists in 11 states.

The truth is that my sex change to nonbinary was a medical and scientific fraud. Consider the fact that before the historic court hearing occurred, my lawyer informed me that the judge had a transgender child.

I should have been treated. Instead, at every step, doctors, judges, and advocacy groups indulged my fiction.

Sure enough, the morning of my brief court hearing, the judge didn’t ask me a single question. Nor did this officer of the court demand to see any medical evidence alleging that I was born something magical. Within minutes, the judge just signed off on the court order.

I do not have any disorders of sexual development. All of my sexual confusion was in my head. I should have been treated. Instead, at every step, doctors, judges, and advocacy groups indulged my fiction.

The carnage that came from my court victory is just as precedent-setting as the decision itself. The judge’s order led to millions of taxpayer dollars being spent to put an X marker on driver’s licenses in 11 states so far. You can now become male, female, or nonbinary in all of them.

In my opinion, the judge in my case should have recused
herself. In doing so, she would have spared me the ordeal still yet to come.
She also would have saved me from having to bear the weight of the big secret
behind my win.

I now believe that she wasn’t just validating my transgender identity. She was advancing her child’s transgender identity, too.

A sensible magistrate would have politely told me no and
refused to sign such an outlandish legal request. “Gender is just a
concept. Biological sex defines all of us,” that person would have said.

In January 2019, unable to advance the fraud for another
single day, I reclaimed my male birth sex. The weight of the lie on my
conscience was heavier than the value of the fame I’d gained from participating
in this elaborate swindle.

Jamie Shupe obtaining a new military ID card with male sex designation in February 2019. (Photo: Jamie Shupe)

Two fake gender identities couldn’t hide the truth of my
biological reality. There is no third gender or third sex. Like me, intersex
people are either male or female. Their condition is the result of a disorder
of sexual development, and they need help and compassion.

I played my part in pushing forward
this grand illusion. I’m not the victim here. My wife, daughter, and the
American taxpayers are—they are the real victims.

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